Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Laura Hetland. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Laura, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
Honey Huntress was born on the island of Maui while I was working as a private tour guide and beekeeper in 2015. Working with honeybees changed my life and I am committed to working for them as long as I live. I used the Japanese Venn diagram called Ikigai to map out my life’s purpose, which helped me create the Honey Huntress. I was also inspired by one of the world’s oldest cave paintings depicting some of the first honey hunters in Spain. In addition, I discovered an amazing woman named Eva Crane who traveled the world from the 1970s-90s working with beekeepers everywhere and writing some of the most important books ever written about bees and honey.
My vision was and is to work for honeybees all around the world and teach others about their importance: honeybee health is human health, and human health is honeybee health. So far, I have worked with honeybees in Hawaii, Wisconsin, and Colorado, and that is just the beginning. My end goal is to create a honeybee and pollinator educational sanctuary.
I have spent the last 7 years networking with beekeepers around the globe. In 2020, I was planning an international trip to meet many of these beekeepers, but of course, COVID made that impossible. However, at the time, one of my dearest beekeeping friends, who lives in Australia, sent me a jar of very special honey. This honey is known as blue honey or honey infused with psilocybin mushrooms (which bruise blue and create a blue tint in the honey). I started microdosing with this honey and found that it helped me with my anxiety and depression.
Last year, I moved back to my home state of Wisconsin to support my mother through the sudden loss of my stepdad. I got a landscaping job at a private botanical garden where I helped manage their bees and gave educational tours to guests. I spent my time off foraging for different edible and medicinal mushrooms and plants. It was then that I had the epiphany… why can’t I infuse other mushrooms into honey?!
Besides the blue honey, my friend in Australia had another honey blended with lots of medicinal mushrooms and herbs, but I envisioned a whole line of different Mushroom Honeys. I searched the internet for other mushroom honeys and only found a couple other companies in the world offering anything like this. I knew I had to turn this dream into a reality. My two favorite things: honey and mushrooms… combined! I was stoked and have never felt so aligned. Like the universe was waiting for me to create and offer this important medicine to the world. So, I did.
The ideas for the different blends came to me effortlessly. After over 10 years of studying mushrooms and herbs, and working in the food industry most of my life, I felt an intuition for which ingredients would work well together. So, that was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out my formulation, as I am definitely no biochemist. Thankfully, I am also networked with a lot of mushroom experts, so I started asking around, and I learned so much about how to work with medicinal mushrooms. The process to create my Mushroom Honeys was full of trials and errors, and many moments where I thought it wasn’t going to work.
However, I became a licensed business this January and found an amazing commercial kitchen in a church 4 minutes up the road from me (and I live in the middle of the countryside!). I was selling my Mushroom Honeys on my website and promoting them through social media while preparing to become a vendor at a local summer farmer’s market. A month before the farmer’s market started, I realized in order to provide the best product possible in a scalable way, I needed to change my formulation again. The pressure was on!
Thankfully, I was able to source the best mushroom extract powders I could find in time, and they ended up being the key to the right formulation for my Mushroom Honeys. Also, looking at the couple other mushroom honey products on the market, I knew that what I was offering was higher quality, potency, and better flavor and consistency than anything else out there. I created something no one else has, and I’m still pinching myself.
With the launch of my booth at the farmer’s market in May, I have been blessed to share my Mushroom Honeys in person with hundreds of people. It’s the best feeling in the world to see people approach my booth with confusion and curiosity over what Mushroom Honeys are, and then see their faces light up when they taste them. My popularity is spreading quickly by word of mouth, and I’ve had many return customers and incredible reviews. I’m hardly able to keep up my supply with the sales each week. I am so incredibly grateful I get to be the one to share this sweetness with the world.
Laura, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
The Honey Huntress mission is to empower others with honeybee and holistic health education. I believe strongly that honeybee health is human health, and human health is honeybee health. Most of us know humans could not survive without honeybees. So, the better we take care of ourselves and the people around us, the healthier the planet and the healthier the honeybees will be. And that starts with what we consume.
Real food is medicine. Clean water is medicine. Nature is medicine. I fell in love with honeybees while living in Hawaii and working on organic farms. But, as many people are, at first I was afraid of them. To transform something you fear into something you love is truly divine. I have been so fortunate to offer this same transformation to many others with honeybee education and interactive tours in Hawaii, Colorado, and Wisconsin. It is my dream to create a honeybee and pollinator educational sanctuary to continue this mission my whole life.
Currently, I am so proud to create and offer the sweetest superfood on the planet: Mushroom Honeys. These are raw, creamed honey infused with organic, functional mushrooms and herbs/spices. The blends available are: Lion’s Mane Peppermint Cacao Honey, Turkey Tail Turmeric Honey, Reishi Cayenne Honey, Chaga Chai Honey, and Infinity Honey (which is an 8-mushroom blend). Besides adding to your tea/coffee/smoothies or spreading on toast, each honey has lots of culinary uses so you can infuse your diet with medicinal mushrooms in the sweetest way possible.
Health is freedom. Health is peace. Health is love. Mushroom Honeys are the sweetest solution for enhancing your health every day! Bee free, honey.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Oh so many! But thus is the journey of an entrepreneur. :)
Most recently, I was faced with the completely discouraging realization that my original formulation for my Mushroom Honeys was not going to work… a month before I was supposed to start vending them at a local farmer’s market. The discovery came to me through a customer in Alaska who ordered all 5 of my Mushroom Honeys, and was my biggest order at that time. He was a young man who I met at a Buddhist retreat center in California almost 10 years ago and had been following my story on Facebook since. I was so touched he ordered my honeys and couldn’t wait for him to try them. Unfortunately, when he got his package he wrote me to let me know that one of the honeys smelled fermented. I was devastated beyond belief and I thought I had to shut down my whole business.
However, it was a blessing in disguise. After the initial devastation, I consulted with many people much smarter than myself. I discovered a new formulation that would not only prevent fermentation but provide scalability to my business, while at the same time improving the quality and potency of my products. I got back in my commercial kitchen and remade all my Mushroom Honeys just in time for the start of the farmer’s market. My new formulation has been a hit, and I am so grateful I get to continue this important work.
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
I’ve had my own website www.honeyhuntress.com since 2015. I hired a web designer to create it for me, and it was originally basically just a blog. However, even as just a blog, it was very frustrating being dependent on someone else for any changes I wanted to make. So, in 2019 I taught myself how to use Squarespace and I made my own website.
I tried monetizing some product and book recommendations through Amazon’s affiliate program, but I wasn’t making any sales so it got canceled. It’s been a journey figuring out self-promotion through social media, one of which I’ve had many more failures than successes so far. But they keep telling me it’s about not giving up. ;)
Now, my website has a commerce section for my Mushroom Honeys, and it’s been going well. My online audience has not been very supportive of other entrepreneurial endeavors I’ve tried over the years to create my own business, but people are so excited and intrigued about my Mushroom Honeys that I’m finally seeing a return on my website investments.
I love having my own website and find Squarespace to be very user-friendly with great customer service. Besides a small processing fee for orders, the Stripe payments system is easy to use and connects directly to my Quickbooks for bookkeeping. I’m not able to make enough of my Mushroom Honeys at this time to offer it on other platforms, but maybe someday!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.honeyhuntress.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thehoneyhuntress
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehoneyhuntress
- Youtube: Honey Huntress Adventures : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiipwU7dieTC4UryhWcylrg
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thehoneyhuntress?_t=8dxuzRrANKM&_r=1